


Recognition

by DraconicSeraphim



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 17:25:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9196043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraconicSeraphim/pseuds/DraconicSeraphim
Summary: They keep saying he was barely recognizable when they found him. Maybe it would have been better if he’d stayed that way. He was certain he didn’t recognize himself anymore.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from the Kink-Meme: Graves is traumatized by the time he spent as Grindelwald's captive. He stole his face, and now he can't look at himself without seeing Grindelwald staring back. People now flinch when they see him or they look away. And what's worse, people expect he will just bounce back to being unflappable gruff Mr Graves and clean up the massive mess Grindelwald left behind. One day, when he is feeling particularly low, he grabs a knife or a razor and cuts up his face badly. That's how one of his co-workers finds him. After that they finally get Graves some help. 
> 
> I would like someone from MACUSA (Picquery, Tina, a random auror or even Abernathy) to find Graves like that, but if you want it to be Newt or Credence, it's up to you.
> 
> TW: Self-harm, mutilation, flashbacks, PTSD, and some pretty intense dissociation.

They keep saying he was barely recognizable when they found him. Maybe it would have been better if he’d stayed that way. He was certain he didn’t recognize himself anymore. 

It was a thought that came unbidden, one of many similar thoughts, each one tucked neatly away and sealed up tight in the back of his mind. Hidden away in that particular space reserved for the worst horrors from the war. Or at least it had been until six months ago. Now the seams of that carefully locked section of his mind seemed to keep tearing open bit by bit, filled to bursting with nightmares wearing his face. 

A thick ugly bubbling under the skin as mismatched eyes darkened and a twisted sneer curled his own lips until he almost thought he was looking at his grandfather. The disapproval and near disgust in the expression were certainly close to the disdain his grandfather had always felt for him. Grandpa Graves had been taller though, lithe and lean, not nearly so broad as Percival. Besides, he’d always had his mother’s mouth. Which only made the curl of those lips more surreal, forming words he’d never dreamed to hear in his own voice, even during the darkest parts of the war.

“Let’s try this, shall we?” The cadence was all wrong. Grindelwald’s accent wasn’t there but the tempo and word choice were so strange to his ears. 

Not nearly as strange as watching as his own wand, ebony and silver, elegant in a way he’d always strived to match, was leveled at him. He was holding it wrong. Too tight and with his fingers too high, covering the pearl band instead of falling over the worn curves where his fingers rested naturally.

“Crucio.” 

He was still scowling, hating the way this stranger wore his skin, cringing at the sound of his own voice, frowning as his lips moved to form the sounds. Then his nerve endings betrayed him, sparking with such pain as he’d never known, fire licking along his very bones as though they would crack apart, tear muscle and tendon from them. His vision blurred, tears coming with the pain-

He blinked, staring at his reflection in the mirror, watching as a tear cut through the lather on his jaw. When had he started crying?

A slow shaky breath and he did his best to tuck the memory back away. Seal it up where it belonged, away from his waking consciousness. How was he meant to work if he could barely remember to breathe through the onslaught of memories. When there was no escaping the thing that made him cringe in disgust, in fear, in hatred. He could not look in the mirror without seeing the manic glee in Grindelwald’s face, in _his own_ face as the pain raced down his limbs and made him scream until his voice broke and there was no sound left to be wrenched from him. 

The dark eyes were dead now, devoid of that joy and the cool calculations that came before each new horror. But they were also empty of the things that made him Percival too. Truly that could be no great loss. Months with that monster wearing his face and not a single person had noticed, sensed anything amiss. 

They said he was barely recognizable when they found him. But how were they to know how to recognize him when everything about the man had screamed that he was not the person whose form he wore. 

He dragged the blade over his skin, removing hair and lather from the place that single tear had disappeared and the next swipe of the blade pressed hard enough to sting, leaving his throat pinked and angry. No one could see who he was even now. They saw the badge, the position, the reputation. 

They said he was barely recognizab;e when they found him.

He didn’t know if it was a conscious decision, even later when Goldstein was shouting at her sister to contact the office. There was something freeing about the bite of the blade, the pain so familiar as it etched a line along the edge of his mouth and down over his jaw. Pain, sharp and logical, cause and effect and this time done by his own hand.

But it had all been his own hand, hadn’t it?

A small sound, something between a sob and a giggle and this time the blade cut deeper scoring across his cheek, fast and vicious and real. Blood, hot and strangely gratifying oozed down his cheek, staining the lingering bits of shaving cream that still clung to the underside of his jaw, to his throat, and his hand trembled as he cleared it away in one stroke. The tremor left flecks on his neck bleeding lightly, tiny pinpricks of blood that were soon lost in the steady seep from his cheek.

Dark, empty eyes stared at the reflection in the mirror, recognition sparking slowly as blood covered more and more of his visage. This was the Graves _he_ recognized. Bloodied and wrong and desperate in a way he didn’t understand how to cope with most days.

There was a soft _crack!_ from his living room, the sound of apparation enough to startle him out of the strange sense of detachment he felt, looking at his own face in the mirror, watching as he turned from something he recalled only as a monster into something familiar.

“Mr. Graves?” Tina Goldstein and here he was failing at his job once more. They were meant to have a meeting weren’t they? About getting her job back… because he was clearly in a position to be in charge of anyone’s future. Maybe who he’d been before but this mangled, broken man before him? He glanced down at the blade in his hand, longing for one more moment of that sweet relief.

“Mr. Graves?” 

They’d barely even recognize him.


End file.
